How the rich have stolen sports

Rocky Balboa worked for a loan shark, extorting payments from deadbeats and derelicts in the slums of Philadelphia. He was broke, with little hope for a better life.

He trained in a meat locker, punching slabs of beef around a refrigerated room, and took pre-dawn runs through Philly’s roughest neighborhoods. When he finally entered the ring in the first major fight of his career, against the formidable Apollo Creed, he had transformed himself into the “Italian Stallion” and lasted 15 full rounds before losing to Creed in a split decision. It didn’t matter: the crowd erupted with joy — their hometown hero had left it all in the ring, and nearly beat the unbeaten heavyweight champion of the world.

Rocky wasn’t about boxing. It was about perseverance and dedication. It was about a regular guy working really hard at something to get ahead. And it was about the hope that such a guy gives to other people. The fight was a metaphor for life itself, a vehicle to convey the struggle of existence — and the rewards. No wonder Rocky became the highest-grossing film of 1976 and won three Academy Awards: People young and old, rich and poor, and of all shades of skin color, saw themselves in Rocky Balboa.

Four decades later, boxing is a gentleman’s sport, whose biggest fights are affordable only for the wealthiest of the wealthy. Tomorrow night, when Manny Pacquiao takes on the defending five-division world champion Floyd Mayweather at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, the spectators will be less “everymen” and more Masters of the Universe: the millionaires and billionaires who can afford the few tickets that were made available to the public.

Of the arena’s 16,500 seats, only 1,000 were sold on the open market — at prices starting at $1,500 and rising to about $7,500. Still, the fight sold out in minutes, and before you could say “knockout” they were being resold on the web for as much as $141,000 apiece. For that price, you could buy a Maserati GranTurismo and still have enough left over to climb K2. The 15,500 remaining seats? They'll go to sponsors, promoters, and fighters.

This is a stark contrast from the Rocky era. When the real-life boxing legends Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali met in the ring for the first time, at Madison Square Garden in 1971, tickets ranged from $20 for balcony seats to $150 for ringside. In today’s dollars, that equates to $124 and $934, respectively — not cheap, but hardly prohibitive. Fathers could take their sons to a fight; friends could go together in a group. Boxing, like a lot of sports, provided an opportunity for all types of people to bond over the excitement of a well-fought show of perseverance and strength.

But boxing isn’t the sport it was 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago, when Mike Tyson became one of the only boxers in history to reclaim the heavyweight title after having lost it. People didn’t just watch Tyson fight to see if he’d bite his opponent’s ear; they watched him because he gave them a shared experience, a chance to see a guy from Brownsville, Brooklyn, box on a world stage. And even if you didn’t follow boxing, you knew who Mike Tyson was — just as earlier generations knew Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, and George Foreman. Like Rocky, they were national symbols of grit. Today, their progeny — like Pacquiao and Mayweather — are national symbols of privilege, further indications of the ever-widening gulf between those with means and those without.

A Maserati GranTurismo or a Sherpa-guided climb up K2 represents the same divide. But no one’s life will be any worse for not having a $120,000 sports car or risking death to reach the summit of the world’s second-tallest mountain. The chance to watch a couple of guys go a few rounds in the ring, on the other hand, should be something anyone can afford.

Because if it isn’t, then Rocky might as well have been about another notable event of 1976: the very first commercial Concorde flights out of London and Paris, at a cost of about $700 per seat, the equivalent of $3,000 today. And who could have related to that?